Teens in Spain

May 1, 2007
Gr 7 Up-These titles present short overviews of the everyday lives of adolescents. Each one contains chapters on school and family life, career aspirations, leisure activities, and festivals and holidays. Despite a few broad generalizations, the books give an accurate and up-to-date view of teens in both countries, with many references to their love of cell phones and texting, and good descriptions of current slang and pop culture. The attractive color photographs emphasize this currency. "France" includes several discussions of the experiences of Muslim immigrant teens, and "Spain" has a short section on different ethnic groups. Each volume includes a chart of quick facts. The books direct readers to the FactHound page, where they are given links to several other sites and book titles with general information about the country. This process seems unnecessarily cumbersome, as the links are to fairly well-known sites, like the CIA World Factbook, which are easily accessible through regular search engines. The lists for further reading are also of little use. Despite these drawbacks, these books would be solid purchases for libraries where students do reports on everyday life in other countries."Kathleen E. Gruver, Burlington County Library, Westampton, NJ"

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